An Overdue Update

Whoa, it’s been a while… I don’t know where the time has gone but I’ve just realised that it’s suddenly February and I haven’t made a post since GameCity. I think it’s time for an update.

So what’s new? It’s been so long now, it’s kind of hard to remember what’s happened. In no particular order, this is what’s been happening with me over the last few months.

I’ve done a couple of 48 hour game jams with my SUPERCORE friends. We’ve recently gotten into the habit of holding a jam at the end of each month, and it’s been a great way to get together and make something ridiculous without worrying so much about the end result. That said, I’m pretty proud of what we managed to come out with in the last few jams.

In December, we made a creepy FPS, where the player has to defend themselves from giant talking alphabet letters. The twist is, to attack an enemy, you have to use the corresponding letter on your keyboard in order to fire your weapon. You can download and read more about it here: http://supercore.co.uk/game-jam-4/

In other news, I started work on another game! It’s another solo project, and it’s called SMITHEREENS. It’s a mimimalist arcade action game in a similar vein to Super Hexagon. The gameplay is fast paced and challenges players’ twitch reaction skills. It came out of a bare bones prototype that I worked on for a few days and then showed to a few people at a LAN party. The feedback inspired me to expand upon it in a bunch of ways and I’m having a lot of fun working on it. Expect some posts on SMITHEREENS in the near future.

I’m currently working on the new game and Laser Bash concurrently; I’ve found that it’s good to have a secondary thing to work on sometimes, especially if you reach a point in your main project where there’s a lot of thinking and planning to be done and not that much implementation. This is the situation I’ve found myself in as I plan some pretty big changes to the way certain systems in Laser Bash work.

Finally, on a personal note, I got engaged back in November to my girlfriend of 7 years! Ever since I started game development, Laura has been supportive at every step, and I’m incredibly lucky to have her. <3